“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”

“About six inches to the mile.”

“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”

“Have you used it much?” I enquired.

“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

— from Chapter 11, “The Man in the Moon,” in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, by Lewis Carroll

The map is not the territory — Alfred Korzybski, Polish-American scientist and philosopher, 1931

The saying “The map is not the territory” has become a truism in intellectual circles. We cannot trust the map, a distillation of the data of our senses, to give us the true essence of the territory. The map guides us through the territory because the structure of the map is analogous — but not identical — to the structure of the territory. And so we pass through the territory without knowing the nature of it.

But with regard to the outside world, in any case, we are prisoners of our senses; we must depend upon them to bring us some indirect report of that world, and it is only within our imaginations that we can conceive of it directly.

Within collage, we make or find a map of the imagination. And it is a map to covet. For the collage map fulfills a dream far beyond the dreams of the mad cartographers in Sylvie and Bruno: collage not only corresponds perfectly point-to-point with the territory of imagination; it is that territory, or a part of it.

And when we dream of every such map ever created anywhere — seen or unseen, known or unknown — we see with the mind’s eye the vast territory that is the collective imagination, the territory that is the mosaic map called Collage.

Thanks. Yes, that’s definitely how I see it: a collage maps the mind of its maker. And it’s fascinating to be able to see even a fraction of the mosaic, and the minds behind it, through the collages of others.

Thanks, Steve. I’m sorry you’ve had problems getting onto my blog. Glad your comment did go through. I really don’t know what the problem is, but I’m trying to find it out and solve it. If you have any trouble in future, could you kindly e-mail me (RetroMan@RetroCollage.com) with the nature of the trouble and any error messages you might have received? That would really help.

Yes Thesis is a great theme, very versatile and easy to change. I also use it for my other blogs and websites. Thanks for your comments, and have a great day!

Thanks, Erika! I particularly enjoyed your posting this week too. I don’t doubt the existence of other senses we’re not yet aware of; William Blake, our favorite poet, once said in The Marriage of Heaven & Hell: “How do you know, but every Bird that cuts the airy way is an immense World of Delight, clos’d by your Senses Five?” Works for me!

Indeed, and I would add that as the map is not the territory, neither is the image. The world is not what you see portrayed in a 30 second sound byte on the evening news, and nowhere is that more true than here in Israel.

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Thanks for your visit and your thoughtful comment, Robin. Yes, I’d agree with you that no single image is ever the territory. And I completely agree that Israel gets unfairly represented by the images and sound bytes of it that are noised abroad.

Thanks very much, Aquariann! It was a challenge to work with the layering of the images in this way, but the results seem to point in an interesting direction. So perhaps it’s time to take this path and see where it leads.

Sylvie and Bruno is the Lewis Carroll that nobody reads anymore; it was allowed to go out of print and, like Carroll’s other published work, is in the public domain in the United States (you can Google it and find several sites where you can download it for reading). It ends in a less satisfying way than either of the Alice books, and its plot is less cohesive as well. But I couldn’t pass up including the quote on the one-to-one scale map when I found it!

Maps can be wonderful imaginative stimulators, and there are many maps out there that are in the United States public domain, and thus free for use without restriction. So feel free to “explore” using them! (Great pictures of the Virgin Islands, by the way.)